


Stasis

by toushindai (WallofIllusion)



Category: Baccano!
Genre: Gen, baccanoweek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 13:20:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7894183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WallofIllusion/pseuds/toushindai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shortly after his arrival in New York City, Czes wonders why he fell back into being Maiza's friend so easily.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stasis

**Author's Note:**

> It's Czes, so... there are references to child abuse.

“You look troubled, Czes.”

Maiza began speaking before he put his hand on Czes’s shoulder, which was just about enough to keep Czes from startling. The boy Immortal looked up at Maiza and found that he was smiling down at him gently.

“Is something on your mind?”

Czes sighed. He thought he’d become adept at hiding his emotions—because dissatisfaction had been an excuse for _him_ to lash out, and then because he knew he had to deceive—but maybe he was growing soft here where he had nothing to be suspicious of. And that was part of the issue, in the first place.

“Do you have a minute?” he asked Maiza.

“I have many minutes,” Maiza answered with mock gravity, his smile not wavering. “Would you like to talk here?”

Czes shook his head. If they stayed at the Alveare, he’d feel like Firo could walk in at any time, and he didn’t want Firo to be a part of this conversation. “Can we go to the park?”

“Certainly! Let me just get my hat.”

Czes was silent on the walk over, letting Maiza take his hand when they crossed streets for appearance’s sake. He knew how to look like he was ten. He’d been acting it for two hundred years.

It _had_ been acting, hadn’t it?

At the park, they found an out-of-the-way bench and settled in. Czes wondered what observers thought of the two of them: did they see brothers? An uncle and his nephew? Was Maiza old enough to look like a father? If things had been different, back then, would they have styled themselves as—

No.

Maiza waited, not pressuring him to say what was on his mind, but he needed to speak before his thoughts ran away with him. “It’s kind of stupid,” he said in preface. “I don’t know why I’m thinking about this to begin with, or what my point is…”

“That’s alright,” Maiza assured him. “What is it?”

Czes’s brow furrowed. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it again. Took a deep breath. Finally: “Maiza, we’re not… human, are we?”

He watched the smile slip off of Maiza’s face for a more contemplative, cautious expression. He looked down at his hands. “I don’t mean physically,” he said, knowing that he could have nails driven into his knuckles or his fingers ground off against rushing train tracks and come out no worse for the wear. “I mean, obviously, we’re not human physically. That was the point. But what about… what about…”

“Mentally?” Maiza suggested quietly.

“I was going to say philosophically, but yes, ‘mentally’ makes more sense.” Czes grimaced at his own flair for the dramatic and tried to voice what had been on his mind. “There’s something different about our brains. There has to be. A human brain shouldn’t be able to handle two hundred years’ worth of memories, let alone an eternity’s. And if it were just that, maybe I wouldn’t mind, but… there’s something else.

“When I got here, I… I shouldn’t have been ready to treat you as a friend. I wasn’t really… planning to, honestly.” His voice got quieter as he spoke and he hunched over in shame. He couldn’t look at Maiza. But Maiza only took his hand, his right hand around Czes’s left, a silent promise and reassurance.

Even as he hated himself for being reassured, Czes spoke on. “But when I saw you, when you reached out for me, it was just… so easy, to go back to being who I used to be. To go back to trusting you, to go back to being ten-year-old Czes who was scared about a long journey and needed comfort from… from an adult. Maiza, _I’m_ an adult! I may not look like one, but I’ve been alive for over two hundred years! I even know how to live independently! And yet… sometimes I still feel like I’m just a little kid.” He took a deep breath and squeezed Maiza’s hand hard to keep from getting sucked into a whirlpool of memories, of delight and relief that he was still a child and terror of what would happen if he ever thought otherwise, of being told over and over again that he was too young and childish and that _he_ should take care of everything. His lips trembled. “M-maybe I’m just stunted,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s got nothing to do with immortality, I’m just… immature.”

“That’s not true, Czes.” Maiza looked out across the park, contemplation on his face. “First of all, I don’t think you’re immature at all. You’ve always been able to mature and grow. And besides… I have that experience, too. I look at Molsa, or Yaguruma, and I know that I’ve lived longer than they have, but I still look up to their wisdom and their age. I feel like they’re older, like I’m still only twenty-six years old no matter how long I live. And even not knowing what you’ve been through, what you may have suffered, there was still something in me that wanted you to be the way you were when I knew you. Something…” He touched the center of his chest with his free hand. Czes knew what he meant: it was the same place where Czes felt a knot of tension that eased whenever he let himself settle into the way things were before everything went wrong.

The same place that had ached whenever he had dared to wonder if _he_ never cared for Czes at all.

“I think something in us may have gotten stuck, that night on the ship,” Maiza continued quietly. “Not just our bodies. Something in our minds, too, that wants things to be as they were, just like our bodies want to reform. That may be part of what it means to be an Immortal.” He sighed softly. “I can’t say for sure, though. It galls me to say it, but Szilard may have gathered more information on the subject, so if it’s really bothering you I could ask Firo if—”

“No,” Czes cut in urgently. He didn’t want that at all. He didn’t want Firo to know what bothered him and he didn’t want Firo to have to dig through dirty memories like that and besides he’d never wanted this answer to begin with; he’d meant the question sincerely, but he’d wanted Maiza to brush away his worries, to tell him he was imagining things, that he was just a child lost in a nightmare—

He breathed heavily, trying to keep himself from crying. Maiza’s hand tightened around his, strong and sure.

“Czes,” he said, his voice soft, and Czes made himself look Maiza in the eye. His expression was calm, and certain, and kinder than Czes had thought anyone in the world could be. Czes didn’t know how he could possibly trust that smile, and in the same instant, he trusted it absolutely.

“I don’t think that means we’re doomed to be the same forever. We can control our thoughts and our actions in a way that we can’t control our regeneration, right? Those are choices that we get to make. And you said it yourself—you’ve learned how to live on your own. You’ve grown up in the space of two hundred years. And in the Martillo Family, I’ve found the kind of friends I never bothered to make back in Lotto Valentino. So we can change who we are. It may be slow change, but we’ve got the time, don’t we?”

“Yeah… I guess so.”

Czes gave a heavy sigh and looked out across the park. People wandered by, paying no attention to him and Maiza. He remembered what it was like to trust people, and he knew that the suffocating feeling in his chest would relax a little if only he would trust them again, just like the ten-year-old he would be forever.

But he couldn’t trust them.

Or rather, he could—but for now, he wouldn’t. He wouldn't let himself.

Like Maiza said, that was still a choice he got to make.


End file.
